Technological Fixes Research Articles

Inconspicuous adaptations to climate change in everyday life: Sustainable household responses to drought and heat in Czech cities

Adaptation to climate change is often understood as a top-down decision-making and policy-implementing process, as well as application of expert knowledge, to prevent or reduce its (locally specific) negative consequences. In high-income societies, adaptation at the household level then frequently refers to adopting technological fixes distributed through the market, sometimes at a considerable cost. Informed by a study in the context of Central Europe, this article aims to discuss different practices of households and individuals that do not require increased consumption of energy or materials, but still help adapting to climate change in some of its local expressions, such as heatwaves and drought. They were described by participants in focus groups in six cities in the Czech Republic. I argue that such ‘inconspicuous adaptations’ emerge without connection to the climate change debate, or without deeper knowledge about the issue. Yet, they should not be overlooked as unimportant and short-term ‘coping responses’ and underestimated in this debate. They are part and parcel of the ongoing process of societal adaptation to climate change.

Genome Editing in Livestock, Complicity, and the Technological Fix Objection

Genome editing in livestock could potentially be used in ways that help resolve some of the most urgent and serious global problems pertaining to livestock, including animal suffering, pollution, antimicrobial resistance, and the spread of infectious disease. But despite this potential, some may object to pursuing it, not because genome editing is wrong in and of itself, but because it is the wrong kind of solution to the problems it addresses: it is merely a ‘technological fix’ to a complex societal problem. Yet though this objection might have wide intuitive appeal, it is often not clear what, exactly, the moral problem is supposed to be. The aim of this paper is to formulate and shed some light on the ‘technological fix objection’ to genome editing in livestock. I suggest that three concerns may underlie it, make implicit assumptions underlying the concerns explicit, and cast some doubt on several of these assumptions, at least as they apply to the use of genome editing to produce pigs resistant to the Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome and hornless dairy cattle. I then suggest that the third, and most important, concern could be framed as a concern about complicity in factory farming. I suggest ways to evaluate this concern, and to reduce or offset any complicity in factory farming. Thinking of genome editing’s contribution to factory farming in terms of complicity, may, I suggest, tie it more explicitly and strongly to the wider obligations that come with pursuing it, including the cessation of factory farming, thereby addressing the concern that technological fixes focus only on a narrow problem.

Smart energy prosumers in Norway: Critical reflections on implications for participation and everyday life

As evidenced by the EU’s 2016 political ambition to empower energy consumers by allowing them to become prosumers, smart energy technologies are expected to contribute to energy savings as well as healthier and more comfortable lives. Norway is a vanguard country in implementing smart energy technologies, and a growing literature of social science and humanities research has investigated how such technology impacts everyday life. Taking stock with this literature and comparing two Norwegian high-tech demonstration cases, where local production and smarter consumption is enabled through novel technologies, the research objective of this paper was to analyse the ways in which smart energy technologies affect users, and the extent to which users can influence the role of smart energy technological arrangements in their everyday lives. Results indicated that there is a divergence between the intentions and the effects of the introduced technologies. For instance, smart technologies and prosuming affected the way people organised their everyday lives by demanding more work of participants. We conclude with recommendations for practitioners relating to consumer participation and energy prosuming, advising a focus on broader implications in addition to smart technological fixes.

Transformative thinking and urban living labs in planning practice: a critical review and ongoing case studies in Europe

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to critically situate co-production methods such as that of the urban living lab within contemporary planning theory and in particular to the ideas of ‘agonistic planning’ and the ‘trading zone’. By critically review relevant literature and discussing the results of an ongoing interdisciplinary project, we will show a number of potentials and issues when translating the urban living lab idea to planning contexts. Potentially our urban living labs have opened up opportunities for local planners to discuss controversial issues by using the idea of nature based solution as a boundary-object/trading-zone. On the other hand, planners’ positivistic and incremental understanding of city making hinders a transformative understanding of the urban living lab and nature based solution in favour of more fashionable technological fixes.

Global uncertainties, geoengineering and the technopolitics of planetary crisis management

ABSTRACT With rising sea levels and disappearing species as harbingers of a planet-wide existential crisis facing the Earth, this article considers the ways in which geoengineering proposals diverge from understandings of global uncertainties and threats within scholarship on the globalization of insecurity, instead identifying ‘the planetary’ as a distinctive space of insecurity. Working at that scale, geoengineering proposals in turn not only claim to offer technological fixes but also in the process fix – in the sense of hypostatising – the meaning of (planetary) crisis, usually circumscribed as a climate crisis. The technopolitics of planetary crisis management thus produces and sustains a wider political economy that can and should be opened up to critical reflection: given that it assumes particular understandings – and thus precludes possible alternative conceptions – of what crisis entails, and consequent sociotechnical imaginaries of how market forces, scientific knowledge, and technological infrastructures might be combined in response.

Gaps in Hospital and Skilled Nursing Facility Responsibilities During Transitions of Care: a Comparison of Hospital and SNF Clinicians' Perspectives.

Adverse outcomes are common in transitions from hospital to skilled nursing facilities (SNFs). Gaps in transitional care processes contribute to these outcomes, but it is unclear whether hospital and SNF clinicians have the same perception about who is responsible for filling these gaps in care transitions. We sought to understand the perspectives of hospital and SNF clinicians on their roles and responsibilities in transitional care processes, to identify areas of congruence and gaps that could be addressed to improve transitions. Semi-structured interviews with interdisciplinary hospital and SNF providers. Forty-one clinicians across 3 hospitals and 3 SNFs including nurses (8), social workers (7), physicians (8), physical and occupational therapists (12), and other staff (6). Using team-based approach to deductive analysis, we mapped responses to the 10 domains of the Ideal Transitions of Care Framework (ITCF) to identify areas of agreement and gaps between hospitals and SNFs. Although both clinician groups had similar conceptions of an ideal transitions of care, their perspectives included significant gaps in responsibilities in 8 of the 10 domains of ITCF, including Discharge Planning; Complete Communication of Information; Availability, Timeliness, Clarity and Organization of Information; Medication Safety; Educating Patients to Promote Self-Management; Enlisting Help of Social and Community Supports; Coordinating Care Among Team Members; and Managing Symptoms After Discharge. As hospitals and SNFs increasingly are held jointly responsible for the outcomes of patients transitioning between them, clarity in roles and responsibilities between hospital and SNF staff are needed. Improving transitions of care may require site-level efforts, joint hospital-SNF initiatives, and national financial, regulatory, and technological fixes. In the meantime, building effective hospital-SNF partnerships is increasingly important to delivering high-quality care to a vulnerable older adult population.

The reformist sustainability discourse and the exclusion of the informal economy from Mexico City’s environmental policies

ABSTRACT The crucial role of the informal economy in urban environmental management is yet to be acknowledged in policy-making. This paper explores the sustainability discourses that shape urban environmental policies, and how they relate to different conceptualisations of the informal economy. Focusing on Mexico City, this paper analyses the discourses of policy-makers and their reflection in the city’s waste management plan. Results show reformist and radical discourses of sustainability are correlated with preferences as to the integration or exclusion of the informal economy in environmental policy. In addressing Mexico City’s environmental challenges, policy-makers have embraced a reformist sustainability discourse that focuses on technological fixes to environmental degradation and promotes a techno-managerial mode of governing. This discourse is correlated with a view of the informal economy as a barrier to the sustainability transition, which leads to the exclusion of informal workers from the policy arena and renders invisible their working conditions and their contribution to urban life. The paper concludes that the reformist sustainability discourse obscures and reproduces environmental injustices – repoliticization of the sustainability discourses shaping urban environmental policies is necessary to achieve sustainability transitions that are also socially just.

Ontological Frameworks for Food Utopias

World food production is facing exorbitant challenges like climate change, use of resources, population growth, and dietary changes. These, in turn, raise major ethical and political questions, such as how to uphold the right to adequate nutrition, or the right to enact a gastronomic culture and to preserve the conditions to do so. Proposals for utopic solutions vary from vertical farming and lab meat to diets filled with the most fanciful insects and seaweeds. Common to all proposals is a polarized understanding of food and diets, famously captured by Warren Belasco in the contraposition between technological fixes and anthropological fixes. According to the first, technology will deliver clean, just, pleasurable, affordable food; future generations will not need to adjust much of their dietary cultures. According to the second, future generations should dramatically change their dietary habits (what they eat and how they eat it) to achieve a sustainable diet. The two fixes found remarkably distinct perspectives over dietary politics and the ethics of food production and consumption. In this paper we argue that such polarized thinking rests on a misrepresentation of the ontological status of food, which in turn affects the underlying ethical and political issues. Food is a socially constructed object that draws in specific ways on habits, norms, traditions, geographical, and climatic conditions. Although this thesis seems somewhat obvious, its consequences on the ethical and political perspectives on the future of food have not been derived properly. After introducing the issue at stake (§ 1), we point out the polarities that characterize food utopias (§ 2) and their ontological faults (§ 3). We hence suggest that a socio-ontological analysis of food can better deliver the principles for a foundation of food utopias (§ 4).

Building capacity towards what? Proposing a framework for the analysis of energy transition governance in the context of urban informality in Sub-Saharan Africa

ABSTRACT There is an emerging scholarship that criticises the conceptualisation of urban informality from a deficit view and emphasises that informality constitutes a way of life, a practice in its own right. We argue that energy is part of the informal way of life and that energy transitions need to take into account the specificities of urban informality when used for policy. Acknowledging energy practices is necessary to improve the justice of energy transitions, including the urban poor in energy transitions without denying the legitimacy of slum dwellers’ ways of life. In this paper, we analyse energy governance in informal urban settlements as implemented by national governments, municipalities and non-governmental organisations, with case studies from Sub-Saharan Africa. We develop a policy analysis framework that assesses (1) the practices of problem definition; (2) the creation of policy options and strategy; (3) the mix of capacities mobilised; and (4) the type of instruments used. The framework is applied to three case studies of energy policies in informal settlements in Kenya, South Africa and Uganda. Results show a strong preference for regulation and technological fixes and do not create capacity to acknowledge and integrate the specific challenges of urban informality and informal ways of life in energy policy, hence falling short of addressing social justice in energy transitions.

Climate urbanism: crisis, capitalism, and intervention

ABSTRACT Born out of one crisis (global economic recession) to address another crisis (climate change), climate urbanism represents a unique development paradigm that facilitates neoliberal accumulation through market-based investments in infrastructure development, technological fixes, and strategic policy approaches. Limited by the ideology of its structural roots and its selective material approach, climate urbanism facilitates projects that protect some urban populations while simultaneously increasing the vulnerability of others. If allowed to continue on its current trajectory, the dominant mode of climate urbanism threatens to exacerbate a crisis-contingent mode of capitalism that would intensify various forms of inequality and injustice. The future of climate urbanism is not predetermined, however. This short paper explores the volatile origins of climate urbanism and seeks out areas for intervention. It does so with the aim of derailing the current polarizing trajectory of climate urbanism in order to replace it with a mode of climate urbanism that prioritizes a more heterogeneous, post-colonial, and transformative vision.

Governing (through) trustworthiness: technologies of power and subjectification in China’s social credit system

ABSTRACT This article examines the technologies of power and subjectification in China’s social credit system through a theoretically informed analysis of policy and legal documents as well as the narratives of social credit practitioners, including local officials and representatives of business partners. The ongoing project is a heterogeneous ensemble of discourses, regulations, policies, and any number of programs aiming to govern social and economic activities through problematizing, assessing, and utilizing the “trustworthiness” of individuals, enterprises, organizations, and government agencies. Drawing on governmentality studies, the article explicates the operation of governmental and disciplinary-pastoral modalities of power in the project, which are interrelated in their logics and overlap in the tactics employed. Whereas the strategy of governmental/biopolitical power is centered on achieving effective economic governance and improving regulatory compliance through technological fixes, disciplinary-pastoral power aspires to shape individual behavior and the collective mores of a locality according to a mixture of market-oriented and socialist-traditional values. Social credit is envisioned to produce and channel homo economicus and homo moralis. However, the relationships between liberal and socialist subjectivities and between rationalization and moralization are by no means coherent. The assemblage of social credit government is characterized by contradictions and contestations.

A holistic strategy for carbon reduction programs in parks and protected areas: Leveraging three “fixes”

Author(s): Johnson, Dana; Brune, Sara; Dagan, Dani T.; Meier, Erica; Wilkins, Emily J.; Zhang, Hongchao | Abstract: Anthropogenic climate change is a systemic threat to conservation goals and society at large, and parks and protected areas (PPAs) are uniquely positioned to play an important role in mitigating this crisis. Reducing global carbon emissions is critical for tackling climate change and we believe PPAs serve an important role in facilitating these reductions. Drawing from Thomas Heberlein’s framing of cognitive, technological, and structural fixes, and particularly the lesson that the most effective approaches include all three, we discuss ways that PPA managers can leverage each fix to reduce global carbon emissions.nWe present the three fixes as pillars of a holistic carbon emission mitigation approach in PPAs and use examples to contextualize each type of fix. However, each PPA is characterized by context-dependent attributes that require climate change “fixes” to be tailored to unique social, cultural, physical, and natural conditions for maximizing long-term sustainable solutions. Therefore, managers who seek to implement or expand carbon emission mitigation strategies may refer to this article, and the examples included herein, as a framework to identify the strengths of their current approaches and to explore areas that can be further developed. [This is a paper from “Systemic Threats to Parks a Protected Areas,” the 2020 George Wright Society Student Summit.]

Geoengineering super low carbon cows: food and the corporate carbon economy in a low carbon world

The tangible progress to address climatic change remains painfully slow. As a result, practices to deliberately manipulate the Earth’s carbon and energy cycles to counteract climate change have gained traction and they are increasingly incorporated into mainstream debate. This paper examines one of the less documented examples of climate geoengineering, namely the creation of ‘super low carbon cows’. Driven by the public’s desire for a low carbon pint of milk or beef burger, I show how a combination of bioengineering, technological fixes and management practices have resulted in, and are informing, everyday changes to the way in which animals are bred, cared for and eaten—and in turn, how it affects the food that we consume. Thus, the role of the cow within the Anthropocene now extends from meat machine and sentient being to climate change saviour. I seek to show that super low carbon cows represent part of a wider climate ‘responsibilisation’ in which business interests and corporate storytelling are governing and enacting everyday mundane practices of climate engineering as part of the corporate carbon economy. Yet, as with other climate ‘fixes’, this paper shows that the super low carbon cow provides, at best, an imperfect correction. Critical gaps in the evidence of the efficiency of the solutions being advanced remain whilst manipulating an animal to be more climate friendly evokes unease when considering the wider sustainability and ethical impacts. Perhaps most critically, reliance on climate engineering to provide cheap and easy ways to control our climate fails to question, far less address, the ever-increasing demand, production and wastage of food. It also potentially undermines the already weak political will for other essential and more radical responses to climate change. In doing so, I contrast the extensive efforts to change the everyday behaviours of a cow with the limited attempts to meaningfully challenge the everyday practices, consumption lifestyles and dietary choices of the general public.

COVID-19 Contact Trace App Deployments: Learnings From Australia and Singapore

As the COVID-19 pandemic has gripped nation states around the world, technological fixes based on smartphone solutions have been proposed as a means to mitigate the risk posed to humans, prevent further economic loss, and overcome societal and business challenges. This article provides an account of the learning from Singapore and Australian implementations of TraceTogether.

Psychology and Surveillance Capitalism: The Risk of Pushing Mental Health Apps During the COVID-19 Pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth technologies and mental health apps have been promoted to manage distress in the public and to augment existing mental health services. From a humanistic perspective, the promotion and use of mobile apps raises ethical concerns regarding the autonomy of the person using the app. However, there are other dangers that arise when technological fixes are embraced at a time of crisis. Naomi Klein and Shoshanna Zuboff have recently warned about disaster and surveillance capitalism—using crises to pass legislation that will benefit the rich and deepen inequality, and using anonymized behavioral data for commercial purposes. This analysis reveals that mental health apps may take individuals at their most vulnerable and make them part of a hidden supply chain for the marketplace. We provide a case study of a mental health app that uses digital phenotyping to predict negative mood states. We describe the logic of digital phenotyping and assess the efficacy data on which claims of its validity are based. Drawing from the frameworks of disaster and surveillance capitalism, we also use a humanistic psychology lens to identify the ethical entanglements and the unintended consequences of promoting and using this technology during the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19 and Contact Tracing Apps: Technological Fix or Social Experiment?

Mobile applications are increasingly regarded as important tools for an integrated strategy of post-lockdown policy response around the globe. This paper explores how the use of smartphone applications for digital contact tracing is currently being framed by media, experts and policy-makers and discusses a number of questions raised by the debate on digital surveillance at the time of Covid-19: How can personal data be adequately collected and protected? Who should access data? What is a legitimate role for Big Tech companies in the development and implementation of these systems? How is the cultural and moral context taken into account in the design of these apps? Should use of these apps be compulsory? What does transparency and ethical oversight mean in this context? As we show that responses to these questions are complex and uncertain, we argue that rather than technological fixes to the current emergency these apps should be introduced in society as societal experimental trials whose effectiveness and consequences need to be closely and independently monitored the same level of precaution and safeguards that social experimentation require.

The post-politics of public-private security governance: An ideology critique of the complaints about Facebook

AbstractHow do public protests emerge and become impotent? Inspired by Žižek's ideology critique, the article examines the ideological underpinnings of contemporary public-private security governance and suggests that worried, complaining subjects are a product of a dominant discourse of expert knowledge and technification. It then introduces three Žižekian dynamics that prevent protests from challenging the prevailing discourse – particularisation, ultra-politics, and cynicism – and illustrates these dynamic through a case study of the history of public complaints about Facebook. The article suggests that Facebook communicates through a discourse of technification whereby it constantly invents technological fixes unable to satisfy the complaints. The article further suggests that Facebook turning into a national security partner in the fight against terrorism online prevents complaints from becoming universalised by rendering even particularised privacy contestations illegitimate. This is reinforced, the article argues, by the subject's cynical enjoyment; that is, the ‘letting off steam’ on Facebook while criticising it.

Tackling the Trickle: Ensuring Sustainable Water Management in the Arab Region

AbstractWater scarcity in the Arab region is intensifying due to population growth, economic development, and the impacts of climate change. It is manifested in groundwater depletion, freshwater ecosystem degradation, deteriorating water quality, low levels of water storage per capita, and added pressures on transboundary water resources. High‐income Arab countries have sought to circumvent the ever‐present challenges of water scarcity through agricultural imports (virtual water trade), desalination, and, increasingly, wastewater reuse. In this review article, we argue that the narrative of water scarcity and supply‐side technological fixes masks more systemic issues that threaten sustainable water management, including underperforming water utilities, protracted armed conflict and displacement, agricultural policies aimed at self‐sufficiency, evolving food consumption behaviors, the future of energy markets, and educational policy. Water management challenges, particularly on the demand side, and responses in the Arab region cannot be understood in isolation from these broader regional and international political and socioeconomic trends. Recognizing the complex and interdependent challenges of water management is the first step in reforming approaches and shifting to more sustainable development outcomes and stability in the Arab region and beyond.

Ecological Sanitation and Sustainable Nutrient Recovery Education: Considering the Three Fixes for Environmental Problem-Solving

In the context of phosphorus as a finite resource and the unsustainable character of current sanitation in Europe, this paper examined social factors in a technological transition towards sustainable sanitation. The evaluation is based on the idea of cognitive, structural, and technological fixes to achieve environmental protection. The cognitive fix has been evaluated through literature and a European-wide survey with universities that offer civil and environmental engineering programs. Contrary to an initial hypothesis, ecological sanitation and nutrient recycling are taught by the majority (66%) of responding programs. There are, however, local differences in terms of context and detail of the education. The main impediments for teaching were identified as academic resources (especially in Belgium, Germany and Denmark) and the technological status quo (Ireland, Italy, Spain and some programs of the United Kingdom). Instructors’ personal commitment and experience was evaluated to be a key factor for an extensive coverage of sustainable sanitation in higher education programs. The role of higher education has a critical role to play in changing sanitation practices, given the unique professional developmental stage of students and the potential for a cognitive fix to contribute to meaningful change.

COVID-19: Insights from Innovation Economists

The present document provides the take of innovation economists on the current pandemic. It is addressed to the general public and focuses on questions related to the Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) ecosystem. It does not present new research findings. Instead, it provides a reading of current real-world developments using economic reasoning and relying on existing economic research. The first part of the report explains the root causes for a general underinvestment in Research and Development (R&D), with a particular focus on vaccines. These causes include an insufficient demand for vaccines in normal times and the very characteristics of R&D. Governments can intervene to mitigate these problems, but government intervention comes with its own set of issues. We discuss three of them, namely free riding, setting research priorities, and acting on scientific knowledge. The second part discusses several aspects related to current STI policy reactions. First, we observe a sizable shift of funds towards research on SARS-CoV-2. Aren’t we wasting money by allocating so much of it on one single scientific problem? Using the concept of the ‘elasticity of science,’ we argue that we are far from a situation where additional funding would represent a waste of money. Second, we also observe an unprecedented level of cooperation among researchers but also an intense competition to find therapeutic solutions and vaccines. We seek to make sense of this apparent antonymy, highlighting how both cooperative and competitive forces might accelerate research. Third, we focus on one policy tool, namely patents, and we discuss whether the existence of patents hampers the search for a solution. We argue that it might, but we provide ways in which patents can be beneficial. They can accelerate research (such as through patent pools) or ensure greater access to innovations (such as with compulsory licensing). Fourth, we notice that the whole STI ecosystem has been rapidly refocusing on SARS-CoV-2 in a way similar to mission-oriented R&D (MOR) programs such as the Manhattan Project in the 1940s. We highlight the fundamental differences between MOR and the present situation. Today’s response is characterized by a proliferation of a wide range of innovative solutions offered by a complex set of institutions and actors with great intellectual freedom and decentralized competition. The third part of the report assesses some potential long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. We firstly discuss its impact on R&D investment. We explain how innovation might be negatively affected by a prolonged economic downturn and highlight the crucial role of stimulus packages in confronting the recession. We also address the influence of the crisis on ICT, arguing that it has been a formidable catalyst for ICT adoption. Next, we focus on clean technologies, another major societal challenge besides the pandemic. There are strong reasons for why cleantech investment may suffer. However, the crisis also offers significant opportunities to accelerate the green transition. Finally, we focus on open science, in particular on open access and open data. The current crisis could be a catalyst for the adoption of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) Data Practices. The last part of the report offers some concluding thoughts. The STI policy response cannot be limited to the urgent need for ‘technological fixes.’ A second line of response involves the production of new knowledge to prevent outbreaks (ex-ante) or mitigate their effects (ex-post). Furthermore, the current crisis is a reminder that all branches of science matter. The pandemic has many facets, and a significant number of scientific disciplines can contribute to dealing with it. We conclude with a forward-looking note, arguing that the most substantial impact of the pandemic may lie outside of the public health realm or the science system. It offers a unique opportunity to adapt the set of rules that govern our society.